The trick of obstructionism is not getting blamed. If minority gridlock is to wound the majority party, voters need to understand it as a function of a "Washington" that just can't cooperate. From there, it's easy for the minority to argue that the party controlling Washington needs to be turned out of office.That's not what's happening. According to a new AP poll, voters are assigning blame to gridlock -- and they're blaming Republicans. Asked whether Obama was doing enough to cooperate with the Republicans, 62 percent said he was. Asked if the Republicans were doing enough to cooperate with Obama, 64 percent said they weren't.
Republicans now run the risk of being blamed for their own irrelevance. The stimulus bill passed without their votes and that's being seen as evidence of their intransigence, not Obama's. Bipartisanship is being measured by through the evident intention's of the players, not the final tally on the bill. If this normalizes -- if Americans begin to expect that the GOP won't cooperate and so Obama can't be expected to win their votes -- you'll have a situation where Obama can reach out to them on entirely on his terms because it doesn't matter if the outreach actually succeeds. If the President asked Mithc McConnell to help him pass Medicare-for-All, it's hardly the President's fault if McConnell refuses. And that will lead the GOP totally, and unsympathetically, marginalized. 
